F17 beta2 Network Rendering crash / strange things

OS 11.1 beta 1
F17 beta2
BCC / Saphire

Well this is an adventure.

first my render nodes apparently crashed and quit on Mac mini i7 2+2core 16gb OS 11.01 release started rendering frames YA ! but then appears to of crashed or quit. no crash log. I have machine turned down to render one frame, 65% avail rem, GPU auto. quit rendering it appears at end of frame render one more try down to lowest settings possible. render node is only using 1.5gb of ram

next MBP 2016 i7 4+4ht 16gb radeon 560 on OS 11.1 - its making frames ! but not before a series of silent crashes or quits. I reduced number of sim frames to 2 and branching on, yet it appears to be rendering 4 frames anyway which is host comp setting. leaving this setting off, I was in crash / quit land.

how my main machine now appears to NOT be rendering even though it says it is. this just from the fact the MPB node seems to be doing all the frames and no assignments to the local machine. status in render manager says it is render... it is, just very slowly now for some reason, then it just bursted thru 4 frames. extremely strange, like it was stuck for a bit.speed on local machine is all over the place from normal for a couple frames to glacial. plenty of CPU/GPU free. now its back to not actually rendering based on CPU activity of only 20%.

FWIW, no error message from render nodes or on render node machines but I guess this means you guy are actually working on this ? making for a better situation ?

S

I experienced issues with previous versions in which some machines generally started to freeze up the rendering for a short time. Mostly connected to RAM and VRAM mismanagement. But in those cases you could see in the render log that they are missing heartbeats. This eventually would cause every render node to stall.
In my (brief) tests with F17 I noticed that the bigger issues of the memory mismanagement seem fixed for me.

Have you tried rendering the composition only on the machines that are having issues, without the render manager?
16GBs of RAM isn't much so maybe you need to decrease the amount of frames that render simultaneously only for the machines that have issues. You do that in the settings of the Fusion render node.

Do you have any fuse in your comp that uses DCTL?
I have some comps with that together with some heavy RED footage and that causes my comp to crash after a while when I render.
My "solution" was to render using Fusion Render Node and install a software called Restart on crash that restarts Fusoon Render Node automatically. I then use Fusion Standalone to act like a Render Manager to render my comp on Fusion Render Node. When it crashes, it restars and keep on rendering from where it stopped. This only works with image sequences tho, not .mov or .mp4

A BIG bug in Fusion if you ask me...

Do you have any fuse in your comp that uses DCTL?
I have some comps with that together with some heavy RED footage and that causes my comp to crash after a while when I render.
My "solution" was to render using Fusion Render Node and install a software called Restart on crash that restarts Fusoon Render Node automatically. I then use Fusion Standalone to act like a Render Manager to render my comp on Fusion Render Node. When it crashes, it restars and keep on rendering from where it stopped. This only works with image sequences tho, not .mov or .mp4

A BIG bug in Fusion if you ask me...

Nothing fancy. jpeg2000 output. I do have a few sapphire and BCC nodes, but all machines installed on same ver before I even tried to network render. yes I had remote volume mounted on render nodes. I was hoping if there was a problem there would be a useful error msg as I think thats now on the radar to be fixed.

maybe network rendering is being overhauled to be reliable, some tools to check nodes for render node ver, fonts, filters, reactor scripts, whatever's to say if something is missing or needs updating.

S